The $10K Cancel: Sometimes A Great Notion
How to do the right thing, but do it wrong
Let he who is without the sin of Federal welfare collection cast the first stone. It won’t be the always-polarizing House Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who got “clapped back” by the White House because her construction company was forgiven nearly $200k in PPP “coronvirus” loans used to pay their furloughed employees. It won’t be the founders of “RADWood” who had $61,460 in federal loans forgiven very shortly before their (rumored) seven-figure sale to my former employer. It won’t even be your humble author, who has been the recipient of Federal welfare twice: as an adult, when I got an FHA home loan at the age of 29, and also as a child, when the Air Force allowed twelve-year-old me to fly a T-41 Mescalero at no charge, and with considerable risk to all souls aboard, as a Cadet Airman First Class in the Civil Air Patrol.
Feel free to thank me for my service any time you like.
Fifty-seven percent of Americans paid a net zero in Federal taxes last year, with most of them actually receiving a bit of a subsidy via the Earned Income Credit. (To my amazement, a full twenty-eight percent of Americans are even more blessed; they pay neither SSI themselves nor have payroll taxes paid on their behalf.)
I’m mentioning all of this up front because I want us to be thoughtful and truthful when we talk about the Biden Administration’s recently announced “student loan forgiveness”, which will award up to $10,000 to debtors earning under $145k a year and double that amount for Pell Grant recipients who also took loans. Many of my readers have never knowingly taken any sort of public assistance, loan forgiveness, or Federal aid whatsoever — but that doesn’t mean they never received a Federal subsidy of one sort or another, perhaps while being unaware of doing so. I once worked a year for an extremely secretive firm which I later found out was basically an arm of the Federal Government. I guess I was taking the King’s shilling there.
Therefore, even if you feel like a complete libertarian maverick who has never accepted a penny from “the G”, try to restrain those feelings while reading the paragraphs that follow. Similarly, if you think college should be free for all, try to put that opinion in cold storage long enough to discuss the facts on the ground at the present moment.
Biden’s SLF, like many of the “big wins” of his administration, appears to accomplished the near-impossible task of infuriating everyone. On the left, you have people saying that it’s not nearly enough, and that $10k is a drop in the bucket for many former students; on the right, the usual suspects have been very busy drawing up unpleasant comparisons between “gender studies majors” and hard-working young people who went to trade school, paid for their own education, or (as was the case with all current contributors to ACF) were genetically intelligent enough to get Mom and Dad to pick up the tab. There’s also an unpleasant difference between the effect a $10k cancellation has for most debtors (not much) and the “cost” to the nation of doing so (reportedly as much as a trillion dollars). Certainly there’s been plenty of social media back-and-forth as a result.
Alright, you probably expected all of that to happen. Here’s what surprised me: